Without ascribing concrete value to it, I've done this my whole career and I am generally viewed as a "know-it-all" .. "Ask kthejoker, if anyone knows, he will."

Especially with regards to solution architecture, you're often combining or comparing a huge (think factorial!) mix of tools, code, data, etc. Each with their own configurations, settings, gotchas, patterns, constraints, capabilities, hacks ...

Being able to quickly recall and locate URLs, code repos, docs, points of contact in a company or the wider community ... for me, it is the ultimate career moat.

This article on A Cloud Guru kind of encapsulates the sentiment well

https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/the-career-changing-...

Anyway, convenient texhnology for spaced repetition plus a second brain is amazing compared to earlier centuries.

In the future this will probably be a core part of OP's question .. adding things to the brain, automatically deriving connections, surfacing things into your "local" memory at the perfect time ...

I memorize a wide variety of things:

* programming things that I use rarely enough that I don't memorize them simply from usage, but often enough that there is a time saving from having to DDG what's the exact way to do something.

* a couple personal information items like my credit card number (I don't like having it saved anywhere), my wife's phone number, my businesses registration number, etc

* moves for solving Rubik cube

* Bible verses